Flight of the Stone Angel (14 page)

Darlene nodded. “Cass started his therapy when he was two. He could read when he was only five years old.”

This was a tribute to a dedicated doctor. And it spoke well of Ira. He must have been highly motivated to participate in the world. “That’s amazing progress.”

“I thought so. But his behavior wasn’t improving quick enough to suit his father. One night, my husband took Ira to a faith-healing service. Have you ever seen one of those sideshows?”

“Yes, a faith healer’s tent show.” This had been a professional courtesy – the evangelist had been to Cousin Max’s tent the night before.

The religious showman had put on an extraordinary performance – gospel music and howls of damnation, elements of carnival and magic, voodoo and Christ.

Charles tried to imagine the terror of an autistic child standing up in front of a thousand screaming people, going through the faith healer’s laying on of hands. In such a setting, the forced contact alone would have driven the boy wild. “I imagine that experience set Ira back a bit in his therapy.”

“More than a bit,” said Darlene, with a faint reserve of anger. “If I hadn’t been working late that night, I could’ve stopped it. Ira was never the same after that. And then, after Cass Shelley died, he got worse – never talked at all for the longest time. My husband took him to another doctor in the next parish. That one tried a new therapy – gave him shots for allergies.”

“Well, allergies
can
create additional problems for the autistic. They – ”

“That may be,” Betty interrupted him as she finished pouring out the coffee. “But the shots didn’t help one bit. He never did improve until his father died, and Darlene got Ira into a state school program.” She spooned cream and sugar into a cup and handed it to Darlene. “I remember the days when Ira would talk your ear off. That child was talking since he was how old, Darlene?”

“Eighteen months. But he would talk
at
you more than
to
you,” said Darlene, almost as an apology.

“But he did have a lot to say,” said Betty, more magnanimously. “Mostly, he would go on about his lists, and his stars. I believe you take your coffee black, Mr. Butler – and three sugars? Oh, yes, Ira was always counting things and memorizing things.”

“One time,” said Darlene, more animated now, “he memorized all the stars he could see from the window of his bedroom. He made himself a star map that even showed the window frame and the curtains.”

“And the things Ira knew about stars,” said Betty. “To this day, I can’t get some of Ira’s facts out of my head. Do you know about the old stars, the cold stars? Just a
bit
of one in the palm of your hand could weigh as much as a ton.” She leaned toward Darlene. “Remember the night the sheriff took down Ira’s missing-star report?”

“That was a time, wasn’t it?” Darlene’s gaze was focussed on the sheriff’s office across the square. One yellow light burned late tonight. “I should go over there and apologize to Tom for blowing up at him. The day he took up Ira’s side – ”

“Let me tell it, Darlene.” Betty began to lightly rock her chair. “Ira was just a little thing back then. Was he five years old?”

Darlene nodded, and Betty went on. “We were sitting out here, like we always do after supper. Old Milton Hamlin was here, too. He was a steady boarder in those days. Dead now and good riddance. I never liked that fool. Milton was one of those people who have to advertise their superior education every damn minute of the day. You know the type, Mr. Butler?”

Charles nodded.

“So little Ira was sitting on the steps right there with his star map,” said Betty. “Suddenly, he looks up at his mother and says one of his stars is missing – winked out in the dark. And he couldn’t have been more upset if it was a lost puppy. So then Milton Hamlin commenced with a lecture. He said stars didn’t just wink out – they went up in a ball of fire, don’t you know – and Ira couldn’t have seen any such thing.”

“Milton was a retired librarian,” said Darlene. “I guess he figured sheer proximity to all those books made him about the smartest man in the world.”

“Turned out later, he didn’t know the first thing about astronomy.” Betty sighed, as though her aggravation with the deceased Milton Hamlin might be ongoing.

“I thought maybe Ira might’ve miscounted his stars. But Darlene had never known him to miscount anything, so she took the boy’s side, and then so did I. Well, Milton was livid. He went on and on about how Ira was just an ignorant little boy, and he had certainly not seen a star go nova. The old fool embarrassed that child no end.”

Betty was warming to her story now, leaning forward to touch his arm and alert him that this was the good part coming up. “Well, the very next evening, Tom Jessop shows up on the porch after dark, with his clipboard and all these official-looking papers. Bless him – he wrote down Ira’s account of that missing star. Tom was dead serious. Asked Ira if he could borrow the star map.”

Betty smiled at Darlene. “Tom was a handsome man in those days, wasn’t he?” She turned back to Charles. “But I’m digressing.”

She rocked a little faster as she picked up the pace of her story. “Milton came out on the porch just as Ira was showing Tom the place where he had last seen his lost star, and the sheriff was writing down every word. Well, Milton laughed at the pair of them, and it hurt Ira all over again – poor little thing. So the sheriff says, ‘You’re right, Ira. Any
fool
can see that star is gone.’ Now he said that to the boy, but he was staring straight at Milton Hamlin, and it was a look to freeze blood. Milton didn’t say another word – not that night anyway.”

She was rocking faster now. “The following evening, just after supper while it was still light, the sheriff stopped by to tell Ira that his star was coming back. ‘Tonight,’ says Tom, ‘And that’s a promise.’ ‘’

Betty slapped her hand down on the arm of her rocker. “Well, Milton nearly bust a gut laughing over that one. The sheriff stared him down, and you would have thought Tom had pulled his gun on Milton – the old fool shut his face that fast.”

Betty ceased her rocking and pointed to the edge of the porch. “Ira sat right there on those steps. Sat there for hours, watching that empty place in the sky. And Cass Shelley’s little girl, Kathy – she was only six then – she was right beside him. Ira believed in Tom Jessop, and so did Kathy. The kids were waiting – you see?”

Charles did see. He was staring at the porch steps. Even if he lived to be a very old man, he knew he would never lose the image of two small children sitting there, side by side in absolute faith, waiting for a star to come home.

“That very night,” said Betty,
“damned
if that star didn’t come back – just like Tom Jessop said it would! There it was, and right in the place Ira said it should be. So then Tom, Kathy and Ira were all huddled together on the steps, real quiet, just admiring that star for the longest time.”

He smiled, knowing that Malcolm Laurie would have thought the sheriff a fool to give away this miracle for free. Charles understood what Tom Jessop had done, and how, and why. He was only having difficulty squaring the man who loved children with the man who had used an insane dog to torture Deputy Travis and Alma Furgueson.

“So it was a variable star, an eclipsing binary.” Charles said it softly, in the manner of thinking aloud.

“Why, yes.” Betty smiled with pleased surprise. “That’s exactly what it was.”

Darlene was also smiling. “Tom called the observatory. He was thinking Ira might’ve seen a satellite or a comet. But they told him a dark star had moved across the face of a bright one and hid its light.”

Charles nodded. The eclipse would have been only hours long, but atmospheric conditions could have obscured the star for several days. So the sheriff had used that knowledge to put on an elaborate magic show for Ira and Kathy.

“It was called Algos,” said Darlene.

“But we call it Ira’s star.” Betty wagged one finger to end her story with a flourish. “And that old fool Milton Hamlin was dead within the year,” she said, as if this might be a fitting penalty for humiliating a small child.

His way was brightly lit by headlights from a long line of cars stretching from the highway to the fairgrounds. Though it had been a bit of a hike from Henry Roth’s house, Charles was making better progress than the traffic on wheels. Always ahead of him was the lure of the giant glowing sign, screaming in neon, ‘MIRACLES FOR SALE,’ and casting its red light on the canvas panels of the circus tent.

He passed the dirt parking lot, already filled to capacity, and entered a crowd of people walking toward the tent. A woman shrieked and pointed up to the center pole.

A ball of fire circled over the tent in the trajectory of a lost and disoriented shooting star. Charles recognized the illusion from his cousin’s store of magic tricks. Squinting, he could just make out the guide wire in the wake of the flames.

He remembered a visit to another evangelist’s performance in the different seasons of childhood and summer. One warm night, on an open prairie, Cousin Max had given away the details of this trick to repay the hospitality of an aging minister on the tent-show circuit.

Charles’s smile was bittersweet.

So Max’s illusion had been passed along through the years, handed down from showman to showman. Would he find other vestiges of Max inside the tent?

As he reached the wide entrance, a young man, no more than five feet tall, pressed a sheet of paper into his hand. Charles accepted it with a thank you. It was a schedule of New Church seminars under the headline of Financial Miracles,‘ and it was printed on paper the color of money.

He folded the sheet into his suitcoat pocket and paid more attention to the smaller man. He could not miss the Laurie resemblance in this young face, but that was a common thing in Owltown. The little man was outstanding for his shoes, which were miles too big for him, his overlarge shirt and baggy, rolled-up pants. The ensemble reminded him of the grab bag mix of clothing worn by New York’s homeless people.

Charles held out his front-row pass. The young man seemed mildly annoyed, for his job was handing out papers – not receiving any. His solution to the problem was to ignore it as he handed a green sheet to another man, and then another. But all the while, Charles’s pass continued to dangle in the air just in front of him. “Excuse me?”

“Yes, sir,” said the young man, shoulders sagging a bit in resignation, for this problem showed no signs of going away.

Charles handed over his pass, leaving the man no choice but to accept it. “Malcolm told me to give this to someone at the entrance.”

“I wouldn’t know about that, sir.” He called out, “Uncle Ray!”

Another Laurie face approached them. This was a man with the graying hair and wrinkles of late fifties. “What’s the problem, Jimmy?”

Jimmy handed him the pass, and now the older man turned to Charles. “Well, you must be Mr. Butler.” Ray Laurie’s smile promised everlasting friendship, but it dimmed as he turned on Jimmy. “You should’ve taken Mr. Butler right in and seated him.”

Now the older man grasped Charles’s arm and gestured toward the entrance. “You’ll have to excuse Jimmy. We never give him anything too complicated. He has trouble concentrating.”

Charles found that odd, for the younger man’s face showed more signs of intelligence than his uncle’s placid expression and sluggish eyes.

Ray Laurie introduced himself as Babe’s brother.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” said Charles.

Ray Laurie’s eyes blanked for the time it took to wonder what loss that might be. When at last he understood, he smiled and nodded. “If you’ll just follow me?”

Charles was escorted to a front-row seat cordoned off with a velvet rope and a reserved sign. His view of the stage would have a slightly sidelong angle, and Ray Laurie hoped Charles didn’t mind.

“Not at all.” Charles had to shout to be heard above the crowd. There must be a thousand people already seated, and perhaps twice that many outside, awaiting admission. “So will Malcolm be carrying on with his brother’s ministry?”

“Well, Mal was the preacher right along, Mr. Butler. Now Babe was a real big attraction, what with his psychic predictions and healing power – I wouldn’t take that away from him. But Malcolm always did the real preaching. He’s a thing to behold.”

Charles was staring up at the stage when a mass of red drape was pulled away from the large board at the rear.

“Now that’s new,” said Ray Laurie, pointing up to the enormous photograph of the late Babe Laurie. The image was bigger than a highway billboard. “You would not believe what it cost to have that made up on a rush order. But Mal wanted to do up the memorial service with style. I think Babe would’ve liked it a lot.”

Charles had already guessed that this giant portrait was not the standard fixture. From his vantage point to the side, he could see a portion of the older prop. All that was visible was the large bloodied hand of Christ nailed to the arm of a giant crucifix, and now displaced by the full-color blowup of Babe’s face.
New icons for old.

The vacant seats were filling quickly as an army of people poured through the large opening in the canvas and filed into the rows of folding chairs.

Vendors with bright orange vests moved among the faithful, loudly hawking souvenirs and charms, shouting to be heard above the restless babble. For fifty dollars, one could buy a lock of Babe Laurie’s hair. The bargain price of five dollars would buy a severed bird’s foot on a key chain to protect a body from his enemies. For that same price, small feathered bags of herbs would cure ills from arthritis to cancer. For a few dollars more, one could have bits of quartz shaped like pyramids, blessed by Babe Laurie himself, and guaranteed to hasten miracles of all kinds. A beer was four dollars, a hot dog was three. And here, brothers and sisters, was the best bargain in the offering, a bit of heaven itself – a pink cloud of cotton candy, swirling on a paper cone, could be had for
two
– count ‘em – only
two
dollars.

And now, with a little prompting from the barking men in the orange vests, the crowd began to chant a mantra.

“Babe, Babe, Babe!”

A gospel choir, dressed in deep purple robes and a mix of dark and light skin, assembled beneath the giant portrait and, a cappella, they sang to the chanting crowd, which took the part of a deafening, rhythmic chorus.

“Babe, Babe!”

“
Oh, when the sa-a-a-a-ints
– ”

“Babe, Babe!”

“
–
come marching i-i-i-n
– ”

“Babe! Babe!”

“
–
Oh, when the saints come ma-a-arching in
– ”

“Babe, Babe, Babe!”

The music of a Dixieland band preceded the musicians, who now marched onto the stage and took their place beside the choir, displacing the chants with rousing trumpets, one clarinet and a trombone. The crowd’s chanting dissolved into cheers and applause. The rhythm of the hand-clapping became a single clap of thunder. The brass sparkled, and the horns hit their highest notes.

The music ended before the song was done, heightening anticipation as the houselights dimmed. One spotlight illuminated a small circle on the billboard at the rear of the stage. The crowd screamed and clapped. The circle of light grew in size and intensity until it was a burning sun.

Too bright. Charles looked away for a moment, and then he turned back with the ‘oh’s and ’ah’s of the crowd to behold a petty miracle made of dry ice and boiling water, as a slow crawl of ground fog rolled across the stage.

And now Malcolm Laurie appeared at the center of the bright circle. His costume had more spangles than a matador’s suit of lights. The low boil of stage fog obscured his legs below the knees as he moved forward in the smooth glide of an artful dancer, and one could believe his feet were not touching the floor. The spotlight dimmed, but Malcolm glittered and gleamed. Smiling a row of dazzling white teeth, he raised his hand for silence. The screams died out in a sigh breathed round the tent.

The litany began, amplified by a wireless microphone and accompanied by the soft croon of the choir. “Brothers and sisters, are you
tired
of being poor? Say, amen!”

“
Amen
!” the crowd yelled.

“Are you
tired
of your misery? Say amen!”

“Amen!”

“I know what you’re wondering, brothers and sisters.
Why?
you ask, oh why has Babe Laurie died and forsaken you?”

The light blazed up in high brilliance. When it blacked out, Malcolm was gone.

Now the spotlight reappeared closer to the front of the stage, and Malcolm came walking out of the light. “Babe is not gone. He is here! My brother is with me. He is with all of us tonight.”

His hands reached out to the crowd, his fingers trembling, his voice soft as a lover’s. “Can you feel it? Can you feel his love? Open your hearts wide and hear me. I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my love.” He strutted from one end of the stage to the other, gazing over the flock, leaving the impression that he had made a profound connection with every pair of eyes.

“My beloved put his hand by the hole of the door.” Malcolm’s hand went to his heart as he sank down on one knee. “And I rose up to open to my beloved.” Malcolm stood up slowly. “My hands and my fingers dripped with sweet-smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock.” His voice was softer, lower, saying, “I opened to my beloved.” He threw out his hands as though to embrace them all. “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine. A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me: he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.”

Charles recognized the more erotic lines from
The Song of Solomon,
more or less intact, with verses out of order. Malcolm stole from the best as well as the least. Charles turned to an elderly woman seated in the row behind him. Her eyes were trained on the evangelist as though he were her lover. And of course, he
was.

Malcolm glistened with sweat and sparkled with light. His honeyed voice rolled over the crowd. The preacher was giving the audience holy sanctioned sex. He was reaching out to all of them, men and women alike, stroking them with his eyes, his voice, touching all the soft places and exciting them to a roar of
“Amen!”
He was the image of a rock star, raw sensuality in the service of the Lord.

“Brothers and sisters!” Malcolm cried out. “I can feel Babe inside of me, filling my body with the fluid of love, the power of God Almighty. I got the power!” One closed fist shot out, angling toward heaven.

“
Amen
!” screamed the crowd with renewed fervor.

Charles stared up at the giant portrait and listened to them intoning the name of Babe, over and over, as their hands shot out and pulled back, again and again, in mimicry of Malcolm.

So this was the New Church, borrowing a bit from the Bible, a bit from Hitler.

Charming.

Malcolm was handed a glass pitcher and a crystal goblet. He poured a clear stream of water into the goblet, but the crystal vessel filled with rich red liquid, and a thousand people gasped for breath.

Malcolm had dared to turn the water into wine.

Charles had seen this done before, but never in religious context. The colored crystals had been hidden at the bottom of the wineglass in that portion obscured by the hand.

The man drank deeply, and then turned his back on the crowd as he looked up to the monster image of his brother. The glass went crashing to the floor. His arms rose in the crucifixion pose and his body began to shake with convulsions. The crowd was hushed. When Malcolm turned around again, he was altered in every way. His mouth was larger, pouting more lower lip, eyes wider, hair slicked back with sweat, and there was a cruelty in this new arrangement of his features.

He strutted from one end of the stage to the other, cock of the walk with the suggestion of a limp. At center stage, he ended his pacing. His jaw jutted out as he drew his body up, puffed out his chest, and arrogance exuded from every sweating pore of skin. His eyes were wild as he staggered to the rear of the stage and back again to the edge. His hands shot out in a gesture of supplication. And then, every spangle on the suit of lights left its own bright track in the air as he writhed and jerked his body in spasms.

“It’s Babe!” screamed a man in the front row. All about the tent was the sudden intake of breath, and then the release of a soft sigh. Utter silence now, all eyes were on the stage. The multitude was mesmerized by the resurrection and the light.

And now, abruptly, rudely, the show moved on to borrow a bit from the legendary P. T. Barnum, a more flamboyant showman than God. The professional geeks were being brought out on the stage: a woman whose arms flew about in an uncontrollable palsy and a man who walked on his hands and dragged his legs behind him. All that was missing was the dog-faced boy and the bearded lady. The band played them onto the stage, limping, crawling, shaking violently. The reincarnation of Babe Laurie laid his hands on them one by one, and then the band played again as the halt and lame danced off stage, healed and whole.

When the fakirs were gone, the less dramatic but genuine ailments came out of the crowd, imploring Malcolm to heal them. One by one, they were brought center stage. Malcolm pressed his hand to the forehead of a man supported by two canes. The man fell backward into the waiting arms of the body catchers. Malcolm dramatically broke the canes across one raised leg, and then the man limped back to his seat, un-healed and falling once before he reached the chair. No one noticed, no one cared. All eyes were riveted on the stage.